“I saw a priest,” said Sofia.
“People die here,” said Mom. Every now and then I could see Mom’s eyes lose their luster and stare at Sofia in the old way. But at other times something new was developing between them.
“He was wearing his collar. He looked our way and took a step in our direction, and do you know what? I stood right in the doorway,” said Sofia, as though she would be able to block the passage of any halfway determined person. My father must have been attracted to short women. “You know how Teddy detests that sort of thing.”
“The priest didn’t mean any harm,” said Mom.
Sofia made an incredulous little laugh. “What if you were stricken—” Her word choice impressed all of us. Stricken. Sofia blinked, had trouble maintaining her composure, and then continued, “and you looked up and saw a priest in the doorway?”
FIFTEEN
For such a sunny person Rhonda Newport keeps her living room very dark, and even with morning light outside, I had to peer around at the framed color photos of the American West on the walls, sand dunes with sidewinder tracks, a mesa and a grazing pinto. It was Monday morning, and I felt like I was living in a rented body. I was telling Rhonda Newport what had happened to my car.
“I thought Bea could drive me down to the lot,” I concluded.
“They towed it back?” she asked in a just-checking tone.
“We left it there beside the street,” I said, feeling like I had to defend the cops.
“Hauled it right back, maybe fifty yards,” she said, showing exaggerated exasperation, letting me know how she felt.
I knew that she was just being nice, expressing sympathy, but I had put the frustration out of my mind and I didn’t want to wake it up. I had dropped by the parking space the night before, prompted by Mom when I had to admit that I had lost track of my car’s actual location. At first I had been certain the vehicle had been stolen again, but the cop computer showed it right back in space 209. The lot was closed at that hour late Sunday night, and I would have to come back in the morning.
“Bea’s gone,” said Mrs. Newport. “She’s working on the brand-new speed bag down at the Pit. One of those real tiny ones.” She indicated the dimensions with her hands, the size of a child’s head. “She said she was learning to patter-punch.” She rolled her eyes as she said this: my daughter the pugilist.
The Volvo was parked in front of my house. I had made the long walk over to Bea’s place, because if I drove down to the cop parking lot, I would be in possession of two vehicles. For the moment I wished all the cars in the universe would evaporate. I imagined my dad’s Mercedes, an older E-class four-door, now totaled because the car had kept rolling for half a block, wiping out a line of parked cars before something stopped it. At least, this was how I pictured it. The cops had a witness, and he would detail what had happened.
What had stopped my father’s car? The back of a truck, perhaps, or a fire hydrant, a white, gushing geyser. And Dad was so careful, waxing the car twice a year so the Turtle Wax would not build up and obscure the shine. Always wax on a cloudy day, or in the garage, he had taught me. Spread wax in bright sun and it dries too fast. He used saddle soap on the leather seats.
“You look like a young man badly in need of a waffle,” Rhonda Newport said. A pink bathrobe was sashed hard around her middle, and she had done something with her hair, a pink ribbon dangling. Her moccasins made no sound on the kitchen floor.
An appliance gleamed on the kitchen counter, a stainless steel jewel box with a dial on top of the lid. She released a catch, and the hinges opened silently to expose a dark grid smelling faintly of hot cooking oil. “A wedding present,” she said. “A Krup limited edition. The Rolls Royce of waffle irons.”
“What a nice wedding present,” I said, like someone learning of an ancient, exotic custom.
“If you bought one now it would be Teflon,” she said.
I made a little face: Teflon, how awful, although I didn’t know anything about it.
“I have a quart of batter in the fridge,” she said, letting her hip lean into me. “And you look hungry.”
She was already unpeeling the end of a half stick of Challenge butter, the wrapper uncrinkling. She sliced off a yellow segment and poked the butter down into a coffee mug. She put it into the microwave and we both watched the mug, with its hummingbird decorations illuminated in its prison, rotating on the glass turntable as the microwave clock counted down to zero.
“You didn’t tell Bea I was coming,” I said.
“Why would I keep a secret from my own daughter, Zachary?”
Any number of reasons, I almost said, before I could think. I added, “It wasn’t much of a secret.”
“You could take a cab,” she said. “The phone is over there, under the corn husks.”
I tried to remember which bus line ran downtown, and if it still ran from up in the hills. There had been cutbacks lately. I could call AC Transit and ask. “I’m not sure I have enough cash on me,” I said.
“Spoken like a gentleman,” she said, painting the dark grid with a white brush she dipped into the mug. It was the kind of brush Mom used to baste turkeys, and the bristles made a soft padding whisper as the iron began to sizzle.
The corn husks were tied together at one end, a great yellow claw protecting the telephone. Rhonda Newport’s tamales were admired even by my mom. They were stuffed with ground chuck and homemade tomato sauce and other ingredients you don’t think of as tamale filling, white hominy and raisins.
“Get me that orange juice container out of the fridge.”
“My dad is going to be okay,” I said.
She gave me a look, tentative, hopeful. A little frill of nightie had wafted out of the bathrobe collar. “This is such a relief, Zachary.” She had avoided asking, I realized. She was being sincere, but she was being something else, too. “I kept waking in the night tossing and turning.” For some, tossing and turning is just a phrase. But I could picture Rhonda Newport punching her pillow, kicking her blankets to free them from the foot of the bed.
The container was designed for citrus, oranges and lemons. The spout and the handle of the pitcher were fuzzy, the way old plastic gets, wearing away into fine cilia. In ten thousand years it would wear out.
“Get me that ladle off the hook,” she said.
She stirred the thick stuff for a moment. She scooped a glop of batter out of the pitcher and let a few coins of it dribble onto the iron. They bubbled and firmed, instantly brown. She flicked them free with a spatula and poured a small flood of batter over the griddle. It was almost like someone making a mistake on purpose, spilling a lake of plaster over a black, pristine surface.
She swung the lid shut, and the waffle iron gave off a whisper.
“You aren’t having any?” I asked.
“Not me,” she said, one hand around her coffee cup. The turquoise ring she wore tinkled against the handle of the cup.
The syrup had a cabin on the label. People used to eat this in earlier times, the label instructed us. The syrup was cold, so it flowed instead of splashing. It ran out through the streets and avenues of the waffle city, and I took some pleasure in watching it fill up all the even spaces.
“His spine wasn’t injured,” said Rhonda Newport.
“No, it was,” I said. “There was some smashed bone—” I couldn’t remember Dr. Monrovia’s exact terminology.
Rhonda put her hand to the back of her head and parted her lips. Then she shook her head and smiled apologetically, like someone who has forgotten her question.
SIXTEEN
“What are you doing here?” asked Chief.
He was folding up his road map of California. The map was so old it was separating at the folds, and he pinched it together with a red plastic paper clip. Matt Espinosa, one of the assistant shipping clerks from inside the plant, was strapping on a back brace over by the loading dock, having trouble getting the worn Velcro to grip. It was a hazy morning, sky the color of milk
.
I made a show of testing knots, the yellow nylon rope making a satisfying squeak with each tug.
“You don’t have to work today,” said Chief, refusing to look at me, like I wouldn’t be officially there unless he acknowledged my presence.
It was Tuesday, after one day off from work, a day spent reading magazines and eating jello salads in the hospital cafeteria.
I opened the passenger door to the cab and climbed in. I was instantly surrounded by the smell of the old truck and the protective quiet. Matt hesitated and made a shrug: what am I supposed to do?
“A delivery schedule doesn’t mean very much. At a time like this.” This was not like Chief at all, grim-faced, terse little sentences. “Espinosa said he’d help me out.”
“Tell Matt to go back to the shrink-wrap department.”
There was nothing I could do to speed my dad’s recovery, nothing I could do to help my mom and Sofia march up and down the waiting room.
Chief shrugged. Matt gave me a wave, a show of being cheerful, both of them letting me know that whatever I wanted was okay.
Chief started the engine and drove the way he never did, about three miles an hour, pea gravel crackling under the tires. He eased the truck along so slowly it nearly stalled, so he tucked the gear back into neutral, as though actually picking up some speed might disturb me.
Even on the freeway he was driving cautiously enough to get a ticket for going too slowly. He had things to say, and he didn’t know how to begin. He had even forgotten to cover up his dog-sex tattoo, wearing a T-shirt that exposed the profiles of two hound dogs mating, fading blue on his upper arm. I had thought of my dad’s condition as something that had happened to me and my family, not guessing that other people would feel connected.
We drove east, out of the cool basin of the Bay Area, into increasing heat. We passed hills cut in half, farms beside the freeway, houses, mops leaning on front porches, and barns, doors open, dark interiors. The hills died out, flat land stretching in all directions. Near Stockton we left the freeway and rolled down a two-lane road, orchard on one side, empty nothing on the other, pasture, weeds.
“If you get hungry, Harriet made me an extra,” Chief said.
I felt the brown bag between us, rolled up tight, crammed with what I called bug-bread sandwiches, wheat-berry bread, bits of wheat like insect abdomens, Chief’s favorite. “What is it today?” I asked. “Bacon and peanut butter?” One of his favorites, one bite and you couldn’t talk for half an hour.
He gave a sharp little laugh: not so lucky. “Cottage cheese and grape jelly,” he said.
A construction site lay exposed in the heat, bare dirt, trucks glittering. I thought this was where we would turn in and find a shady parking place under one of the few trees. We passed it by, although Chief took his foot off the gas pedal to give it a look.
“You can pick up a lot of overtime working a job like that,” said Chief.
Men walked in the air, supported by the yellow skeleton of building, bare wood.
“But there you’d be,” I said.
Chief shifted gears, having trouble with the truck because of the smog device that had been repaired that morning, sucking off some of the engine’s power so its exhaust would run clean.
“It just seems like a wasted life,” I said.
He rolled down the window as far as it would go.
I heard myself keep talking, the Amazing Nuclear Mouth. “You spend most of your time keeping your bills of lading in alphabetical order and snipping your receipts together with that little yellow stapler.”
He made a point of watching a crow abandon a telephone wire and flap over the road. For a long time his driving was a way of responding to me, his eyes shifting from the speedometer to the road to the sky, keeping us right on the speed limit.
The truck lumbered up a gravel road toward a pink stucco house, balconies hanging off every wall, a view east, west, and north of the flat, empty landscape. A man waited for us, so little happening in his life that our arrival was enough to make him stand and watch us for the last half mile, a little figure in the middle of all that heat.
An excavation showed where we were supposed to leave the hot tub, one of the health club models, compact but heavy grade, made to last.
“The Lord has been good to me and my wife,” said the tall man with white hair all over his chest. In a cowboy hat and a pair of tartan plaid shorts he looked like an ad for skin cancer, how to get it. He was already going red, a man probably sixty who needed his mother to tell him to go get a shirt.
“Beautiful out here,” said Chief, the country scenery making him drop the beginning of his sentences. “Big sky, fresh air.”
“Blessed us with five healthy kids and seven grandchildren to date,” said the man, signing one of Chief’s forms.
“They’ll have fun in that hot tub,” said Chief.
“Oh, this is mainly for medical reasons,” said the man as he put his fingers on the line where he had signed his name, feeling the contours of his own handwriting. “Reasons of health,” he elaborated, like maybe we hadn’t understood what he meant. “My hips,” he added.
“I hear nothing but good things from people with hip trouble,” said Chief, accepting his clipboard, examining the form, making sure all the little blank spaces were scribbled in.
“Bone spurs,” said the man.
“Nothing like hot water to ease the body,” said Chief. He had a gift with people, agreeing with them with a smile. “Hot water and enough time to take it easy.”
“Easy does it,” said the man.
I couldn’t stand it when grown men did this, open their mouths and fire inane statements at each other, like a contest, who can say the dumbest things.
I found a pebble in the path and gave it a kick, not able to just stand there and listen to Chief practically promise the man a cure for bone spurs, whatever they were, deteriorating calcium in the man’s limbs.
SEVENTEEN
Sometimes I forgot for a few heartbeats, and it was just another day, two lanes, the sky clear, all the way to the horizon.
We rolled north along the two-lane, a drift of sprinkler mist touching me through the open window. The almond orchards were irrigated by sprinklers on high poles, white plumes of water.
“Let me know if you want to stop,” Chief said.
Chief had a citizen’s band radio, a veteran Magnavox with two knobs missing. I never saw him use it, and he didn’t carry a phone. If I wanted to call the hospital, I would have to trek across a plain of petrified cow pies and knock on a door. “Doesn’t it get on your nerves when someone says how the Lord has blessed him?”
“He was just being friendly.” He looked over at me, a question in his eyes, the passing scenery reflected in his glasses.
“Thinking that God is wrapping up presents for you and you alone,” I heard myself saying. “A new house, a big new lime-green fiberglass hot tub, little skin cancers on your shoulders.”
“You’re just mad because he didn’t give you a tip,” said Chief. He worked the transmission out of fourth and into third, the gear box grumbling somewhere under our feet. Chief never complained, but I knew the old truck was a bitch.
As we slowed down something made me want to break Chief’s clipboard into tiny pieces. Maybe it was the bantering Chief kept up, able to pretend things were normal. I hated him for it, but at the same time I was grateful. I had written my GED essay about Chief, the person who had influenced my life. I should have written about my father.
Chief swung the truck up onto a rutted dirt road, fighting with the steering wheel. He let the truck lurch to a stop. For a moment I thought he was going to say, That’s enough out of you, Zachary, get out.
He turned off the engine, but even that was not a smooth operation. The key turned stiffly, and when the engine died the truck began to roll a little. Chief pulled on the parking brake and the truck steadied, stopping. The quiet was punctured by the sounds from under the hood, hot metal falli
ng still, cooling. He climbed out of the truck, and I followed, up to a barbed-wire fence.
Silence. Hot wind. The crush crush crush of our footsteps.
“Can you believe having a head that small?” he was asking, his voice loud in all that quiet.
An ostrich peered at us from behind the fence. It had to turn its head sideways to observe us, like any bird, its head bare of feathers except for a few white hairlike filaments. Its ear was a fuzzy hole in its skull. Its feet were gray talons, huge, dinosaur prints in the dust.
“They buy these ostrich eggs for two thousand dollars each,” said Chief, holding out his hands to show the size and shape. “Keep hoping a demand for ostrich enchiladas will sweep the nation.”
Chief liked this, stories about people blowing their cash in a stupid investment. His father had been a pit boss in Vegas. Chief said most people were hopeless when it came to handling money, thinking they could beat the odds. But there was some kindness in his tone, too, as though people couldn’t help dreaming.
A woman stepped down back steps in the distance and made her way toward wash hanging on a line. The line itself was invisible, mirage rippling the air. She saw us and smiled, the whiteness of her teeth across the distance, friendly, someone we would never know.
“Maybe they like the birds,” I said. “As pets.”
“Would you?” But he wanted to agree with me. I could tell by the way he picked up a spine of weeds and held it out to the ostrich. Another bird marched from behind a shed, wending its way across the trampled earth.
As the second fowl cocked its small, dark eye, a dog scrambled from the back porch of the house. The woman called to it, but the dog ignored her, barreling across the drought-yellow lawn, swinging wide to avoid the angle of the barbed-wire fence, running hard down the road to stop right before us.
Half German shepherd and half haystack, he exposed his teeth at us and released a long, low growl. He gave us an especially ugly display, peeling back the skin of his snout, showing every single tooth.
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